


The trouble, understand, is she got reasons he don't

by Florchis



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Her relationship with fitz is at the core of this but it is not necessary romantic, Introspection, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Season/Series 02, Survivor Guilt, Translation, Trauma, why did jemma leave for hydra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24845731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florchis/pseuds/Florchis
Summary: Fitz was right about giving her the oxygen because it takes 223 hours for Jemma Simmons to breathe again.Jemma tells Mack that she left because she was making Fitz worse and that is true but only part of the truth. Jemma leaves because too many things have changed and she is not only talking about Fitz.
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	The trouble, understand, is she got reasons he don't

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The trouble, understand, is she got reasons he don’t](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7435812) by [Florchis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florchis/pseuds/Florchis). 



**_Y sé que vas a estar mejor cuando me vaya._ **

[ **_Y sé que todo va a seguir como si nada._ ** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFzh-6TxfXI)

**_(And I know you will be better when I am gone._**

**_And I know everything will still be the same.)_ **

* * *

Fitz was right about giving her the oxygen because it takes 223 hours for Jemma Simmons to breathe again. 

She doesn't like to think about it that way, because that mouthful of air she finally takes is not oxygen filling her alveoli but a wave of sand splitting her trachea right in the middle. She stumbles inside the lab with a hand at her throat- she knows that pain is subjective, but while she crumbles to the floor under a desk, she can’t stop thinking that this crushing sensation can’t be anything but a physical wound. 

She doesn't like to think about it that way, because she can’t take for granted the air that has kept her alive without being unfair to Fitz’s two minutes of anoxia and his glassy eyes and his aphasia and the nine longest days of her life. 

She doesn't like to think about it that way, but it’s the only thing she can do because it’s the way she feels: the decompression is hitting her late and she is not feeling the relief of reaching the surface but the desperation of being in the middle of the ocean with Fitz being a dead weight between her arms.

Jemma curls around the boxes yet to be unpacked and her hand fumbles blindly inside, hoping for something that can dispel the sinking feeling. Inside the box, there are only screwdrivers, a soldering gun, wires, wires, and more wires, and Jemma would gladly exchange her right arm for an automatic pipette or a Petri dish. 

There is nothing rational about her reaction but that doesn’t make it any less real: maybe it’s because she is hyperventilating or because she feels the waves crashing sharply against her skin, but the edges of her body are fading and there is not a single solid thing for her to hold onto. 

* * *

During the nine longest days of her life, Jemma is on autopilot. Her life just became hours and hours of staying by Fitz’s bedside and the constant checking of his vitals. Jemma is not that kind of doctor and even if she were she couldn’t be his doctor due to their personal relationship, but that doesn’t mean she can trust about anybody with his care, not even better fitted and more stable doctors.

She checks on him because she can’t trust anybody, but also because she is the one who needs the constant reminder that he is indeed alive when his ashy skin and his unmoving eyelids and his shallow breathing are trying to prove anything but. 

Jemma watches people pass them by- Coulson with encouraging words, Skye and Trip with sad smiles and sadder hugs, May with her characteristic silence. Jemma watches day turn into night and night turn into day, and even though everybody tells her that she needs rest and a clear head and to be able to breathe outside of the tragedy, her body has become one with the chair and she is almost sure that if she were to put one foot inside this room, the world would crumble around her. Her sanity is connected to the acute angles in Fitz’s heart rate monitor and she is not foolish enough to lie to herself about it.

The thing that breaks her heart- besides the possibility she refuses to name, even inside her own head- is the silence. Her relationship with Fitz has been almost ten years of uninterrupted conversation: Jemma can not remember them ever running out of things to say to each other, and they have never shied away from a discussion even if their eyeballs hurt from rolling them so much. Without him to hold his share of the dialogue, Jemma feels like her own voice is being beaten into silence. That’s why she just nods to Skye’s shy attempts at conversations and doesn’t look at the doctors when they tell her the daily report. She is not trying to look down on them: she is just owning to the fact that she could not speak a word without breaking in tears.

Jemma is not _on_ autopilot; Jemma has become automatic herself, and during nine days, of the woman who jumps out of planes to save everyone else and shoots superior officers in the chest, only the reflex action of her middle and index fingers over Fitz’s carotid artery remains. 

* * *

Fitz is looking at her with eyes bluer than normal and for a second the terrible thought that maybe it would have been better to not see them ever again crosses Jemma’s mind. He looks at her with his face tilted to the side, no smile and completely soundless, he looks at her like she is not real, like she had finally become one with the furniture after nine days, another machine only there to check his vitals and don’t think while she stared at his terrifyingly pale lips. 

Fitz blinks tiredly and closes his eyes again and Jemma presses the button at the side of his bed to call his doctor- _not her-_ and breathes for the first time after 223 hours of holding her breath and crumbles in the lab desperate to touch a Petri dish. 

* * *

Surprisingly, the after-days are harder on her than the nine-longest-days-of-her-life. 

Maybe because she didn’t dare entertain the idea that he could not wake up and didn’t dare prepare herself for the aftermath either. Maybe because she is breathing again and the oxygen in his brain is forcing her to feel like a living being again- and laughing makes her human, sure, but hurting is the only thing that reminds her that she is alive.

Maybe because he is awake now and she can not justify the pain she feels to herself without guilt. Maybe because everyone walks around base with painted-on smiles- they are not tricking her, just because she is not talking to them doesn’t mean that she doesn’t notice she is not the only one devastated. 

Maybe because he is awake now and he is entitled to the pain and the grief, they can not deny him that right, but what is everyone else going to do with their heavy hearts and their tired cheeks. 

* * *

Jemma tells herself that she does it for him and she is not lying. She will use that reasoning as a weapon against Mack’s distrust- he will be right but Jemma Simmons got thorns now and she doesn’t take a punch without giving it back, even if she deserves the first one. 

Jemma tells herself that she does it for him and she is not lying, but he is not the only reason and that is a secret she will take to her grave. (She still isn’t exactly sure that the weight of her guilt is not what keeps her tethered to this world.) 

Jemma tells herself that she does it for him and she is not lying, she honestly believes he will be better without her around, if only because she won’t be adding her grim heart on top of his own problems. 

Life is too complex for Jemma to be able to tell herself that she does it for him and be completely honest about it. Life is too complex both in and outside her head, and maybe she shouldn’t be thinking about it too hard, but if she were able to shut up her brain maybe she wouldn’t have entered a world- sixteen years old, eyes full of wonder, pasty arms, anxious hands- that only wanted to eat her and chew her to spit her out and then start again. Jemma is grateful that she can tell herself she does it for him and that’s true, because if she can’t convince herself she will have to leave through the big door with holes in her stomach and shameful eyelids, and he doesn’t deserve that. And neither does she. 

But she is lucky enough to be able to tell herself that she does it for him, and Coulson nods because it’s true and everyone sees The Change and Jemma doesn’t need to say that it’s not that what causes her anguish. She has known him for almost a decade now and she can not tell apart anymore what was originally his and what was originally hers, and even more: what is his now, what is hers now. She doesn’t care that he no longer has steady hands and easy conversation. He is still Fitz, he is still Fitz in the freckles on his forehead and in the inquiring power of his blue eyes. Jemma has adapted through a hundred ways he had changed through the years; she could adapt to one more.

It’s not the change in him that worries her. It’s the change in them that keeps her awake at night.

While he was in the coma there was no one to know and no one to judge, but now that he is awake and remembers exactly what he told her in the bottom of the ocean- they haven’t talked about it, but she knows he knows with as much certainty as she knows her own hands-, how can she act like she doesn’t know?

Jemma is forced to be painfully aware of each one of her gestures and the weight of her words and just knowing that she can’t be with him as natural as she used to make her be even less natural. Fitz put on her shoulders a weight she didn’t want, a weight she didn’t ask for, and how can that be anything but a terrible injustice. 

(Jemma wishes she could get mad at him, but his hands shake and his words get stuck behind his teeth, and how could she get mad at him without feeling even more like a monster than what she already feels?) 

She convinces herself that she doesn’t care about him changing, and she is in denial that the change in them is what makes her want to leave. What she can’t deny is that what makes her leave for _Hydra_ is the change in herself. 

Coulson nods when she speaks about leaving, but he raises his eyebrows when she mentions going undercover, maybe because Jemma based her whole speech in results and doesn’t mention at all that she needs an outlet for the poison that is eating away at her pharynx and her taste buds.

Jemma based her whole speech on how badly they need what they will gain with the consequences of her request and she doesn’t mention at all the reasons why she is asking. Coulson maybe has his suspicions, or maybe knows, or maybe doesn’t care, and he lets her leave through the big door with her teeth clenched tight and her chest cold and the only lie she ever told to Fitz in ten years dragging behind her ankles.

Jemma chooses Hydra because it’s necessary, true, but more than anything because she wakes up every morning at five to watch Ward do his own routine at half-past five. Jemma doesn’t choose Hydra because Ward is not talking, doesn’t even choose Hydra to ruin Ward’s life. Jemma chooses Hydra because she wakes up at five and with a hot cup of tea in her hands she watches Ward do sit-ups in silence and thinks of all the different ways she could kill him with what she has in her lab desk alone.

Even from a tender age, Jemma never rejected death (what is old needs to die so new things can be born is a universal truth about the world, and as an observer and an admirer of life, she can’t break free from the fascination of that logic). But there is a vast difference between dispassionate interest on a dead body that is an object of study and the raw desire to feel a pulse stopping under her fingertips.

That is, mainly, why she lies to Fitz: she can’t tell him she is going undercover in Hydra because she can’t in good conscience deny the linear relationship between Ward’s blood that she imagines under her nails and the memory of the tender skin of Fitz’s neck under her fingertips.

She lies to Fitz and she leaves through the big door with an alibi, not because she is not strong enough to wait him out through his stammering or because his love is a burden too heavy for her shoulders to carry (even though those two things are also true), but because Jemma Simmons is now a woman capable of killing, and she can not pretend it makes no difference when it makes all the difference in the world. 

If all that weren’t enough, Jemma now knows that she would kill for him. She knew she loved him before that terrible and enlightening discovery and the problem is not her love, the problem is that he put her between a rock and a hard place, forced to quantify and describe and measure that love that until now was a spring of warm water in her solar plexus, not a hard, cold object with clear, sharp lines to hold between her index and her middle finger. But a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do, and quantify, describe and measure are things any scientist knows how to do. And when a scientist runs into a problem they can not solve, they sleep on it. Jemma sleeps on her love and her hate through all the weeks she is in Hydra and all the weeks that follow, and she knows one day she will wake up with an answer. 

Meanwhile, she sleeps and dreams with Fitz’s hands open, palm up, and smelling like bitter almonds. 

* * *

**_Y en la distancia no seré más tu parte incompleta._ **

**_(And with the distance I won’t be your missing piece anymore.)_ **

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of LLF Comment Project, whose goal is to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Prompts
>   * Image reactions
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> This author replies to comments (but it might take a while). If you'd rather not get a reply, please add *whispers* to your comment.



End file.
